Positioning technologies revolutionize and monetize mobile device use. Indoor positioning technologies enable, for example, discovering local services, proximal “push” advertising and related content, finding people and items of interest, performing consumer analytics, delivering a digital coupon (e.g., in a mall), finding a gate at an airport, finding an item in a store, position-based digital rights management, and tracking worker safety. Indoor position technologies can be used in venues such as a shopping mall, a hotel, an airport, a college campus, and an entertainment destination.
Conventional indoor position technologies are accurate enough to determine an indoor position of a mobile device to within three to five meters. Indoor positioning technologies are this accurate because the technologies can use a combination of data from global positioning system (GPS) signals, global navigation satellite system (GLONASS) signals, WiFi signals, and sensor outputs to determine an indoor position of a mobile device. The mobile device performs very precise indoor positioning by combining and analyzing this data to estimate the mobile device's position and to perform a stochastic estimation of the mobile device's path.
Conventionally, a physical wireless access point, such as that in a WiFi network, uses multiple media access control (MAC) addresses to provide a respective multitude of services to a specific mobile device. One type of service provided is indoor positioning of the specific mobile device. To the specific mobile device, the multiple MAC addresses make the access point appear as multiple virtual access points, and each virtual access point appears to the mobile device as an independent physical access point. To support multiple service set identifications (SSIDs) per access point (AP), there can be:                1. Multiple SSIDs per Beacon, Single Beacon, Single Basic Service Set Identification (BSSID). A MAC address can serve as a BSSID.        2. Single SSIDs per Beacon, Single Beacon, Single BSSID.        3. Single SSIDs per Beacon, Multiple Beacon, Single BSSID.        4. Single SSIDs per Beacon, Single Beacon, Multiple BSSID (this is the de facto industry standard).        
The first three approaches having a single BSSID are easy to handle from a positioning perspective since only a single BSSID is seen by the mobile device. However, using multiple virtual access points poses problems when performing WiFi-based indoor positioning.
Conventionally, when a mobile device performs indoor positioning, the mobile device scans each of the available MAC addresses (i.e., each of the multiple virtual access points) to obtain indoor position assistance data from each available MAC addresses. In response to the scanning of the MAC addresses, the physical wireless access point provides the same assistance data to the mobile device in response to each individual scan (i.e., multiple times). Thus, when scanning each of the MAC addresses, the mobile device duplicates effort, wastes processor time, and wastes energy. Wasting time due to duplicative scanning leads to in scanning a fewer number of physical access points, which results in lower positioning accuracy and longer times to fix a position of a mobile device.
Accordingly, there are long-felt industry needs for methods and apparatus that improve upon conventional methods and apparatus, including the improved methods and apparatus provided hereby.